Sunday, 1 August 2010

This week's lefty weekly newspaper has a nice half-page piece about London LGBT Pride. Delga have it reproduced on their website already here, which is helpful.

See, mostly it's all good stuff: just two things make me go "Ah, but".

It makes that common mistake of making London-upon-Thames Pride sound like it's the national thing. Which I really don't think it is any more: in the 90s it was, back then it was so much bigger than the others and there was a real sense of momentum towards it, of spotting other queers on the road down south. But since then the other Prides have grown: I've not been there the last two years but by 07 and 08 it had nothing like that sense of build as you arrived in the city. We're not quite at the point equivalent to the Tony Wilson "wake up America, you're dead" line, but it is far more like that now. There are fifty or more Prides around the UK. If Pride was a corporation, London is no longer the majority shareholder. When evoking lefties to raise the stripey banner high, encourage them to do it everywhere, not just down in the bottom right-hand corner of the island.

But more than that, there's a difficult line in reference to "gay" marriage: "next year will be the 41st year of the London Pride marches - I hope that we might be marching with some married LGBT couples". There are already lots of married LGBT couples. Most LGBT people are not lesbian or gay. Even most LGB people are not lesbian or gay.

I made a little web graphic about something that keeps coming up in conversations around bisexuality both in person and online. While lab...

Jen

I'm a bi activist in the UK - editor at Bi Community News, and behind projects like Bi Bloggers (which brings together people writing about bi life in the UK) and BiPhoria, the UK's longest-running bi group.

I led the teams running the UK BiCon in 2004 and the International BiCon in 2000, and more recently initiated The Bisexuality Report (pub. Open University 2012) and the Bisexuality Research Guidelines (pub. BCN & BiUK 2012).

The Bisexuality Report was the natural progression from the Bi Life report in 2003. You can grab that one off the BiPhoria website.